Postcards from Thailand

Again the installers arrived early, and things generally went pretty smoothly. The sink and hob were quickly installed. The hob, to be honest, is a bit of an extravagance. I had a perfectly cromulent gas hob. However, having to order a new gas bottle every time it ran out of gas (without warning) was a pain, plus the bottle itself took up quite a lot of space. The original thinking with the hob was that it promised a super-duper, extra powerful, three ring burner to make top notch wok fired food. The reality was that I’ve met more powerful damp squibs. The new ceramic hob has a ring that is supposed similarly to be powerful, though my expectations are sufficiently low that I’m not going to be disappointed however feeble its thermal emanations.

Sink and Hob Installed

The sink is another extravagance, as is the tap. I could have recycled the thin stainless steel bowl which buckled every time the equally pathetic tap was put into use, but I didn’t. What can’t be seen from the photo is that I’m also having a water heater installed. Cleaning using cold water (well, what passes for cold water in a 30ºC climate) isn’t great for heavily greasy dishes. So, rather than give up on the belly pork (or muu saam chan, literally three layer pork as it’s known here) I went for the hot water solution. (The Chinese refer to belly pork as “seven layers of heaven”. That’s really not fair. Why should they have four more layers than the Thais, and why should those layers be more heavenly?)

The wall cupboards went up today and are looking OK-ish. It’s a pity the top and bottom units couldn’t have been aligned, but such is the way of the world.

Kitchen Cupboards

This, however, is the problem area. The kitchen company mismeasured and the provided granite work surface was 4 cm too narrow. The company is, shall we say, less than enthusiastic about owning up to having made a mistake or about rectifying it. Watch this space.

Kitchen Cupboards

Apart from the replacement work surface, all that needs to be done now is for the sink water heater to be installed in a couple of days.

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I was expecting the kitchen installers to arrive at 11:00. They turned up early – very much a rarity in Thailand. In fact, they were an hour and a half early. Still, I’d already moved out all the boxes of stuff so everything was already set.

The team quickly got to work assembling the cabinet carcasses, though there were some minor issues. Initially the position of the central “peninsula” was off by around 40 cm. I pointed that out to them, and after a ‘phone call by the team’s boss to the office, that was sorted.

Kitchen peninsula

I was a bit disappointed that I had been expecting customised cabinets to fit around a concrete post in the corner of the room. To explain, the usual technique for constructing houses in Thailand is to pour a concrete framework in situ. (Rather worryingly, no proper quality control on the concrete mix or the pour. You just have to trust the builder to get it right.) The large spaces between the posts are filled with rough brickwork or breezeblocks which are then rendered over. One of the beauties of this system is that one can knock down entire walls (as I did in extending the kitchen) without affecting the structural integrity of the house. The negative is that one has concrete posts protruding into one’s living area at regular intervals. (I really don’t know why they don’t have the posts jutting out on the outside. That would seem to me a better solution.) Anyway, the kitchen company decided that they couldn’t customise the lower cabinet, so the “gap” I’d included in the plan as a space for hanging tea towels is now 10 cm narrower than designed. I don’t know whether there’ll be enough air circulation for the towels to dry.

Kitchen with post and gap

Queue bad joke that I came across a few days ago:

Q. What is the most common owl in the country?
A. The teat-owl.

Also a problem is the width of the work surface. When measuring up the supplier hadn’t noticed that a section of wall is outdented by around 4 cm and taken this into account when specifying the granite slab. This means a new slab will have to be provided. At the moment they don’t know whether they have a suitable piece in stock, or whether it will have to be ordered from Denmark. Perhaps I’ll know today how long the wait is likely to be.

And finally, I was told that the installation work will take 3 days, rather than the 2 that I’d previously been told and planned for, which is a tad disappointing. However, having been without a kitchen now for 2 months, a few more days doesn’t matter. Oh how stoical I can be at times of great hardship!

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To date I’d been living with the fridge and water cooler in the sitting room. To be honest, it’s been rather convenient not having to walk too far to get a cold glass of beer or water. Now I’ll be getting just that little bit more exercise doing so.

Fridge and Water Cooler

The four boxes of suet mix in the foreground don’t reflect a particular love of dumplings. However, they were on sale, reduced to a fraction of the original price – the typically exorbitant price demanded for imported foods.

Elsewhere in the kitchen I have most of my crockery and utensils in cardboard boxes. It will stay like this, and I will continue living a very provisional life, for another month or so, until the kitchen units are installed, and the plumbing and the electricals are done. Shouldn’t be much more than a month or so.

Kitchen With Boxes

Incidentally, the problem with the tap in the middle of the wall was solved by building up the wall so that the tap became hidden behind thick plaster.

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The tiling is finished, as are the electrics with the sockets installed, and the walls are now painted.

Tiling Done

In yet another element of my war against heat I’ve had a wall fan installed. In my old kitchen I had an ordinary floor fan which took up rather too much of the already limited floor space. It also was very effective at blowing garlic skins all around the kitchen as I peeled the cloves. It would be too much to hope, though, that the wall fan won’t do that.

Wall Fan

I really will have to repaint the old kitchen door. It looks so shabby now.

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Now, call me old fashioned, but when I start tiling I start at the bottom of the wall and then work my way upwards. To do otherwise is illegal: it breaks the law of gravity. However, Thailand being a national of scofflaws, the tilers do things differently: they started part way up.

Wall Tiling Defying Gravity

In Thailand it’s much more common to tile wall walls to the ceiling, as they do with public toilets in England. (That is, “used to do”, the public convenience rapidly becoming a thing of the past in the UK.) However, I only wanted tiling as required: a splashback behind work surfaces, and a black border around the foot of the walls to protect them.

More Tiling

There is, however, one problem: a tap jutting out of the wall.

Problem Tap

The tap can’t be removed without destroying the wall. This is typical of the very short sighted thinking of the builder. It seems more important to them to build cheaply and quickly, rather than to produce a house that can be maintained. For example, the ceiling light fittings have been glued to the ceiling and can’t be changed without destroying the ceiling itself. Similarly, the kitchen cabinets have also been glued to the wall, rather than fixed properly.

Anyway, I really don’t want a pointless, rusty old tap sticking out of the wall of my nice new kitchen. Who would?

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Day 11 saw the installation of the sliding glass door and windows. The glass door should let in a lot of light. However, I’ll probably need to put a reflective film on it to stop the kitchen getting too hot.

Doors and Windows Installed

The external wall was also plastered, as you’ll see in the photo.

At the same time the ceiling installation started. There’s lots of insulation in the ceiling cavity, my again being concerned how hot the kitchen will be. With the old kitchen I usually cooked in my underwear (not an attractive sight, I can assure you, and probably very disturbing for the neighbours, should they catch a glimpse of my Rubenesque form).

Ceiling Installed

The extractor fans (there are two of them) should also help extract lots of hot air. I wonder if they have lots of them in the Houses of Parliament.

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Day 10 saw the roofing put on the drying area

Drying Area Canopy

and on the canopy over the car.

Car Canopy

The freshly painted metalwork really shows up the poor condition of the paintwork on the gate.

The following day the son-in-law of the woman who lives opposite came across to talk to me about the canopy. He said that the sheeting had been installed upside down, and that mould would grow in the tracks of the upper surface. This I found a little disconcerting. A bit of Internet sleuthing revealed that Thai opinion on the matter was very much divided, much as Swift’s Lilliputians were divided over which end to crack an egg.

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The walls went up very quickly and render slapped on and smoothed down. And, as you can see in the background, the previously gaping holes for the windows were shaped.

Walls Up

Unfortunately, that turned out to be a problem. I’d decided to replace the old kitchen windows which were of the louvre type. The glass slats were a pain to keep clean and never looked particularly nice. Plus, it was going to look nicer if both windows looked the same. The new windows are a bit narrower than the louvre ones, so the window hole needed to be padded to one side.

Window Alignment

Unfortunately, the side the builder decided to pad meant that the right hand side of the window would be hidden by kitchen cupboards: the work had to be redone. Fortunately this didn’t take too long or (I hope) cost me too much.

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Day 5 was a total washout, thanks to a passing tropical storm. To be honest, so far the weather has been surprisingly clement during the day: awesome thunder storms at night, with torrential rain and lightning flashes, but mostly just drizzle or light rain during the day.

In the last couple of days the floors for kitchen extension and drying area have been poured, the metal skeleton of the extension erected and some lower brickwork courses laid.

Kitchen Ribs

At the same time as having the kitchen extended, I’m having the drive relaid; it had subsided badly – perhaps 15 cm or so – and consequently cracked. To date, the old drive has been dug out and a new one’s concrete poured. I’m also having a canopy erected so I don’t get soaked opening the gate when leaving home during a thunderstorm. Perhaps more importantly, it’ll keep the rear of the car less rained upon, and so less frequently in need of a wash. Work is well under way for the canopy.

Car Canopy

Whisky seems to approve.

The drive will be tiled. I had wanted cobblestones, but the cost is ridiculous. Even the synthetic cobblestones are as pricey. The tiles arrived yesterday, and laying should start on Day 8.

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For the last couple of days the focus has been upon the foundations for the kitchen. Concrete has been poured around the piles and a mould formed to receive the concrete raft the extension will rest upon. In the foreground of this picture you can also see that they’ve dug trenches which will be used for poured concrete beams which will support the covered drying area next to the kitchen. (For much of the year, when drying clothes I’ve had carefully to watch the skies for signs of imminent precipitation. Far too often I’ve rushed out in torrential rain to retrieve partly dried pants, getting soaked in the process. During the rainy season, the weather can be too stormy for days on end to permit laundry. Once the kitchen extension is complete I’ll be able to bring my washing machine in from outside, which will help a lot, and hang up clothes for drying under cover.)

Kitchen Foundations

There was one hitch today: a water pipe which I’d thought only served the bar (a bar which I’d instructed the original builders not to construct and so was redundant), was cut. Once more the bizarre piping of the property flummoxed me: this was in fact the illogically placed fresh water pipe for the upstairs, and I found myself sans water upstairs. Fortunately the builder was able speedily to rectify things and I can now shower again.

In the background of the photo, to the right of the satellite dish, you can see the black tape used by the neighbour’s builder to fix where their kitchen extension pulled away from the side of the house as I mentioned in my previous Postcard.

Today also included a trip to a builders’ merchant, so I’ve bought such fripperies as ceiling lights and a motion-activated flood light for the drying area. The latter will also provide extra security covering the sliding glass doors from kitchen to the drying area. Hopes of buying electrical switches, sockets, extractor fans and a wall fan, however, remained unfulfilled.

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